Grisey’s Time and its Conceptual Implications
Spectralisms, IRCAM, 13 June 2018. Post-1945 Music Analysis Interest Group, Society for Music Theory, 8 November 2019. This paper illustrates how three of Gérard Grisey’s essays—“Réflexions sur le temps,” “La Musique: le devenir des sons,” and “Tempus ex machina”—accord with Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Jacques Nattiez on the structure of perception. Instead of purporting to prove direct influence, exploring their common ground clarifies and elaborates three central issues in Grisey’s writings: (1) the differentiation of time and how it casts music as a process of becoming; (2) the identification of tone with pulse on a spectrum of contraction and dilation; and (3) how Grisey’s later three-part theory of musical perception relates to his early distinction between measured and perceived time....